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Author Archives: Thanh Le

As we all know, the rule of marketing had changed due to the presence of technology. Inbound marketing communication notably rises, because outbound marketing communication become less effective and more annoying. Today, a lot of things hold Asia’s business back from inbound marketing communications. The main reason is lacking of professional digital marketers and innovative software which support inbound marketing communication. Due to that problems, I realize that having professional digital marketing knowledge and experience will give an incredible opportunity in working for multinational inbound marketing firms in South East Asia. Therefore, I came into this Digital Marketing class with the hope that I can learn something new, things that I never have heard about. I believed that with the whole new and practical knowledge, it will contribute to my competitive strengths to get good jobs and help Asia businesses out of the problems.

I still remember vividly the first day of my digital marketing class. I was such overwhelming by a series of discussions in class about A/B testing, UI/UX, Google Analytics, etc. My emotion at that moment just liked “What is the teacher talking about? It’s all Greek to me!” At that time, the only thing I knew about digital stuffs was Google, and I had no ideas about the huge and wide knowledge beside the Google Search. After three months in this class, I can swear that I have never had a class like this before. Everyday in class was filled with new topics, new lessons and even new terms that I had never heard. To prepare for each class, I have to do a tons of reading, learning, studying and blogging about the topics that will cover in class, such as:

Guess what? I blogged 18,243 words in these past 10 weeks! My blog posts have gotten me 145 blog views and 59 visitors from 9 countries. Google Analytic Platform Principles and Inbound Marketing posts have the highest views. To me, this is my big achievement. First of all, I did not share my blogs to my friends. I want visitors who visit my site are new people. From that, I can know how far I can attract people by my writing skills and good content. Therefore, I am very happy with these figures. Next, the referrer through my blog mostly is coming from search engines and Google Search. Lastly, I was shocked by the amount of words that I blogged. Previously, I never thought that I can write a blog in Vietnamese. I was not a good writer, but now I blog in English with professional content. How can this be possible? My answer is slog. Thence, this achievement encourage me a lot. It compensates for my hard-working efforts.

To back up my knowledge, I also get these certifications within three months:

Google Adwords Certification: Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results.

Website development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery.

What can I do for you as digital marketer? My answer is pretty much everything to help your business keep up with competitors. With solid knowledge and practical skills that I gain from this class, I am confident with my analytical skills and data-driven thinking. In addition, I am also proficient in using website analytics tools, social media management system and online advertising system. Currently, I am seeking a career in Marketing Consultant for company like HubSpot or international digital marketing agency in Asia. The reason is I want to dedicate my talent to the development of Asian businesses. Indeed, it can be a challenging environment, but I believe that my outstanding qualifications, knowledge and experiences will contribute a positive impact for your company.

Fifteen years ago, there was only a dial telephone to use in my neighborhood. That dial telephone was bought by the savings of people in the neighborhood. If anyone needed to use telephone, they had to come to “chief of neighborhood” house to use. (In Vietnam, every neighborhood has a leader to take care of that neighborhood). Nowadays, everyone has their own cell phone, and every house owns a telephone or even more than one. The presence of mobile changes the world. Communication is much more easier, and costs less. Geographical distance is narrowed. Globalization is promoted.

If the presence of mobile changes the world, the revolution of smart phone shapes people activities, buying behaviors and the way of consuming content. Today, it is easy to catch images about people do multitasking activity with their phones on streets, buses, restaurants, or even in their cars while driving. When hanging out with my friends, I did felt really annoying most of the time, because our conversations always interrupted by my friend’s phone messages, emails or promotion alerts. Nevertheless, as digital marketers, that annoying moments are our opportunities and benefits. Mobile media become a good channel of communication between brands and consumers. In addition, with the strong growth of smartphone, it opens a new era for cheap media and holds power of the most powerful tool. Accompanied by rapid growth of the Mobile Marketing, Internet Marketing is an inevitable trend, and indispensable in the media industry, in today’s mobile era.

Consumers increasingly modern. They often use mobile devices to surf the web, access social network and surf e-commerce sites. Taking advantages of this shift, an integrated marketing approach born, SoLoMo. SoLoMo is Social (social) + Local (location) + Mobile (mobile). This is the integration of the three most common forms of marketing today: Marketing on social networks, location-based marketing and mobile marketing. This is integrated into a powerful tool for businesses to attract new customers. This strategy helps business to reach the right customer, with the right message, in the right time and place.

67% of cell owners find themselves checking their phone for messages, alerts, or calls — even when they don’t notice their phone ringing or vibrating.

44% of cell owners have slept with their phone next to their bed because they wanted to make sure they didn’t miss any calls, text messages, or other updates during the night.

29% of cell owners describe their cell phone as “something they can’t imagine living without.”

According to Millwardbrown website, it displays that American spend much more of their time on mobile screen (red square) rather than computer, tablet and television screens. Smartphone devices (red graph) also gain big portion in devices usage during day.

2. Because your competitors are:

Let’s imagine about a day of your customers! In the morning, when they wake up, they will check their emails, read some articles, or check social media notfications on their cell phone. Then, they will go to work. In office places, they use computer during working time. However, in their breaks, they will use their cell phones. After work, your customer may be use tablet to read books, watch films or play games. Perhaps, your customers will be exposed by a tons of ads and content, while they are using these devices. Your competitors will take advantages of this situation and display relevant and quality content. Thence, if you do not take actions, you will be lose in competitive race. To stand out of the crowds, besides having excellent and relevant contents to your customers, you have to have professional mobile marketing strategy.

3. It is annoying to your customers, if your website does not look professional in mobile site.

Most of websites are engaged to this problems. Have you ever visited a website, and it does not work on mobile site? To me, it happens a lot of times. For example, the text is extremely small to see, or the click to action buttons do not work. The next action of mine after visiting that websites was leaving the page immediately. If your business website is in this situation, you will lose a lot of chances to market your brands or products to your customers, because 60 Percent of online traffic now comes from mobile.

4. Increase customer lifetime value.

Mobile App is a great way to hold customer. According to “Starbucks has managed to get you addicted to its coffee — and its app” article, it stated that customers pay for a purchase using a smartphone 7 million times per week, with mobile payments now accounting for roughly 16 percent of total transactions. Not many businesses implement mobile payment methods like Starbuck. Starbuck app significantly contributes to the success of Starbuck. Starbucks app integrates with the My Starbucks Rewards program, which allows shoppers to earn special discounts and freebies. In addition, it also has inbox messages, where customers can receive discounts alerts, free apps and free songs. Amazingly, Starbuck App also has order and pay part recently. It allows customers to order their drinks from their phone and pick up their drinks at store without waiting in lines. Overall, The convenient features of apps combine with in-store activities of Starbucks bring the best values to its customers.

You need consider visitors’s goals between mobile site and primary site. Basing on customer’s needs on each site, we can build our mobile site effectively. To do this, you need to analyze your customer activities on your mobile sites.

Not every device has the same screen size and resolution. Responsive design advocates maintaining a single website for all devices and device resolutions. It allows a site to adjust its layout depending on the size of the screen. You need to pay attention on this part because the way your websites looks consistent from all of devices are seriously evaluated by our customers.

Personalized experiences are very important. According to SOLOMO 4R strategy, you need to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time in the right format based on the device being used (places). GPS function of smartphones allow you to target your audience by geo-location. Your part is creating content fit with each location and relevant to your customer.

Marketers in digital era requires fast learning, high adaptability, and hard-working. New technology release every year. Today is era of mobile marketing, but tomorrow is a question mark. If you don’t want to miss any new releasing digital marketing techniques, following my blog to keep up with the times!

You’ve seen the craze for learning code. But what exactly is coding? Coding is what makes it possible for us to create computer software, apps and websites. Your browser, your iOS, the apps on your phone, Facebook, and this website – they’re all made with code.

Nowadays, the technology are shaping the world, so learning coding empowers you to do many things you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Most of things are created by coding, such as computer softwares, apps, websites, phones, social media pages and even microwaves or washing machine. Believe or not, as a today digital marketer, if you do not know coding, you will lose a lot of benefits and competitive strengths.

Here are 7 reasons that a beginning digital marketer should know how to code.

Many good career opportunities open up: If you know more than one language, it would help you to improve your employability. Code is computer programming language. Learning how to code is like learning a new language. If you can speak “code” language, bingo, welcome to success world!

Impress people around you, especially, your recruiter.

Challenge: If you like challenging and creative, learning how to code allow you to develop your own things.

It’s flexible: Let’s imagine that you run a startup business! Of course, you have to create a website for your company. You hire a web developer to do that. When you want to add or fix small elements in your website, you have to ask for web developers help! It is very inconvenient. You always depend on other people and it costs a lot of money to hire a web developer too. If you know how to code, you can need web developer in initial time, but you can monitor your website well latterly.

More career paths for you to choose: When you work with technology, there are more opportunities to work online, or remotely. In addition, you can become a career coder, or web developer.

Saving a lot of money when you start your own company: Starting your own company require a lot of capital and investments. Not having to hire a programmer in the initial stages can save a lot of your money, so you can use that money to spent on other aspects of your business.

Increase your salary: Money is life, so do coding!

HTML, CSS, JavaScript languages

HTML, CSS, JavaScript languages are foundation programming language of web development that you should know. HTML is an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, which is used for building web pages. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is used for styling web pages. JavaScript is the language for programming web pages.

HTML:

At first, I will talk about HTML. The image on the left side shows some common HTML codes that we use to build web page. HTML allow us to write content, add image, link websites, and etc. In addition, we can also choose word fonts by coding tags like bold, italic, underline, and so on.

Previously, I learn coding by myself from w3school.com and use Notepad ++ to code my website. Although w3school website is free, and very helpful, it might be boring for beginning learner, because you have to research and study by yourself. When you code wrong, you do not know why you are wrong. After study digital marketing class, my professor showed me other great website to learn. It is Code Academy website. I found out that this is a very cool website for beginning learner. Absolutely, it’s totally free!

From my screen shot, you can see that Code Academy has very clear instructions (the white column in the left-hand side) and automatic checking program (the red box in the bottom). In writing code, the rule is when you start with whatever elements, you have to close the element with “/” sign. For instance, you want to write a heading. You start the heading code by “h1”, then, you need to end your heading code with “/h1”. When I write these codes, I forgot to put “/” tag in the end of heading 5. The checking part immediately popped up to show me where I did wrong. Does it sound really cool to you? To me, I love Code Academy website so much! It strengthens my determination to study more programming languages in Code Academy website.

CSS:

CSS defines how HTML elements are to be displayed. With CSS, you can adjust the color of your background, the color of your heading, the position of your elements, the font size and font style, and etc. I really like CSS part. I am kind of a picky person. Therefore, it took me a lot of time in this part to design my website. The picture on the left hand side shows some common tags of CSS.

JavaScript:

After familiar with HTML and CSS, I believe that you will eager to learn JavaScript. JavaScript is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. With JavaScript, you can create a lot of cool stuffs, from buttons, to automatic clock, to pop up alert and so on.

The calendar run automatically. To display the date and time, you can click on the white button, it will show you current date and time. You can visit my website to see how it work!

Does all these things sound very interesting, but very complicated to you? No worries! I know it takes a lot of time and efforts to create a website like that. To me, it took me three months to learn and code my website. Nevertheless, I have an alternative way for you to create a website, if you don’t have much time to learn coding. Let’s visit Squarespace! Squarespace is a SaaS-based content management system (CMS) which is composed of a website builder, blogging platform and hosting service. The service allows individuals and businesses to create and maintain websites and blogs. You can build your own website without knowing how to code. The system is very easy to use, remarkably flexible and powerful. Every interaction is polished. Features are thoughtful. They also provides many choices of design, stylish, and modern templates that you can choose. Nonetheless, English only! Sorry for other languages! It is only inconvenient point of Squarespace that I do not like. Squarespace provides many pricing options for customers. For business, it costs 24$ per month. The plan include unlimited pages, galleries and blogs, with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and contributors.

I did try to create a website in Squarespace. I just use trial version, so my design is limited. I tried to design a website for my shop, which named Joy Shop. Joy Shop is handmade Christian gifts. We made Inspirational Message Pens, Bible Cover, Knit Bags and etc.i in order to do fundraising to help street kids and poor kids in Vietnam. Because Squarespace does not provide other languages for building web pages, I think I have to create website by our own 😦 . I hope that I can finish the Joy Shop website in this summer, so I can start my fundraising project.

In a nutshell, knowing how to code will open a whole new world to digital marketer, because it brings to you many advantages, and differentiates you with other people. Why don’t you start to learn coding today?

Programmatic and native advertising are sub-set of content marketing. Both of them help to build trust and engagement with customers and potential customers by content. In this blog, I will discuss about Programmatic and Native Advertising, and its benefits to businesses.

What is Programmatic?

Programmatic is a common day term but very few people understand it. It is a transformation (transition) to a new generation of online advertising. In short, programmatic is just a fancy new term to define automated media buys. Billions of dollars have been invested and bet on that transition.

Why is it important?

Do you remember the last time you buy an airline ticket through an agent, hotel reservations via phone or through a travel agent? To me, I remember the last time I bought airline ticket through an agent was 5 years ago. From 2010 until now, I prefer to purchase airline tickets online, such as Expedia, Cheapair, Kayak, and etc. Hotel reservations, and booking airline tickets online are super easy and more convenient than ever nowadays. Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been invested and bet on the advertising market will undergo a shift as purchasing airline tickets or hotel reservations.

Imagination a time when you adopt a software platform and run smoothly every ad! Just through a few clicks, your ad will appear on Youtube, Facebook, and the other Ad Network. You will save a lot of time in gathering data, aggregating information, reporting, and so on. Everything is in one place. When everything is automated, the cost will be cheaper. The heavy workload on the data will be released, so marketers will focus on creative activities only.

With programmatic ad buying, marketers are able to purchase specific ad spots on webpages that will be seen by their exact target customers in real-time.

Programmatic is a catchall term that many people are using to categorize everything from behavioral and intent-based targeting to real-time bidding and exchange-based buying of inventory,” says Peter Naylor, former evp at NBCUniversal. “Programmatic is advertising’s newer, better mousetrap.

How does it work?

Programmatic is simply automatic program (program + automatic). The ads which are bought through auction by computers, commonly known as RTB (real-time Bidding). This is just a way to buy advertising automatic (programmatic). This term covers a range of technologies enables automated inventory purchasing, appeared advertising (placement), optimal efficiency instead of booking ad through agency, calling, meeting and faxing. Through automatic technology, advertisers can buy ads as the way they purchase on Amazon or eBay auctions. It’s the method by which all advertisements will come to be bought and sold like search ads on Google—auction based, with the buyer paying whatever price an ad is worth at a given moment. It’s buying specific audiences using lots of data to figure out the right ad, the right person, the right time. Therefore, programmatic is more efficient to reach consumers than traditional ad buying.

A new report from BI Intelligence finds that real-time bidding (RTB), a key piece of the programmatic ecosystem, will account for over $18.2 billion in U.S. digital ad revenues in 2018, up from just $3.1 billion in 2013.

Despite of the fast growing of digital ad sales, I do not believe that programmactic can replace entirely traditional ad buying, because it’s just a part of online advertising.

What is Native Advertising?

From the second half of 2012, a new term was born named Natural Advertising (Native Advertising) and quickly is considered the new trend of marketing. According to Wikipedia definition, Native advertising is a form of online advertising that matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears. For example, an article written by an advertiser to promote their product, but using the same form as an article written by the editorial staff. Formats for native advertising include promoted videos, images, articles, commentary, music, podcasts, and other media. Many people think that native advertising is new form of advertising to reach customers, who hate being interrupted by traditional advertising. To me, native advertising is just an old way of advertising, but it is worn in a “new custom”, which is called Internet. Nevertheless, I do not deny the benefits of native advertising. With the “new custom” and some tactics, marketers can make viewers experience native advertising as watching a normal content, but very interesting, relevant and attractive content.

Why Go Native?

Traditional Ads ways are annoying customers. With the Native Ads, customers can scroll past them if they’re not interested.

Native ads get attention. This will leads to more clicks through rate and conversion rates.

Great For Branding: 97% of mobile media buyers report that native ads were very or somewhat effective at achieving branding goals.

They are easy to share.

Although Native Ads offer many benefits to businesses, there are a lot of difficulties and challenges to build effective Native Ads.

Ad Quality – native advertising requires more and better ads, and this is a real challenge for brands and their agencies

Ad Avoidance – if we fail to give them great creative, consumers will learn to avoid these new ads, and “banner blindness” will become “native blindness”

Transparency – native ads placed in the content well must be clearly labeled as such or we will lose consumer trust

Social Fatigue – today, native ads are being poured into every form of social media, and this could easily lead to fatigue and avoidance

Scale – while marketers want brilliant creative, they also need this at scale, and it’s a challenge to deliver both in native today

In conclusion, programmatic and native advertising are the current and future trend of paid advertising. The technology just change very fast. As digital marketers, we have to update regularly to maximize our marketing strategies. If you don’t want to miss any new releasing digital marketing techniques, following my blog to keep up with the times!

Google is the search engine world No. 1, which attracts billions of searches each day. In addition to basic web search, Google Search also provides 22 other free services, Google Adwords is one of them, which is used for advertising service. Thanks to the advantages of Google Adwords, ads on Google are very attractive to customers and play important role as a bridge, which helps to deliver product information to potential customers in the quickest way.

What is Google Adwords?

Adwords is an acronym for “Advertisement keywords”. Adwords is Google’s online advertising platform, which is performed on search engines and other webs that Google system link to, so it helps to drive interested people to your website. Adwords is the main source of Google revenue, which brings more than 90% of the profits for Google Inc. Google provides advertising solutions for customer by various types of payment with three main forms:

Keyword advertising on search engines.

Keyword advertising on the websites.

Banner ads on websites.

Users can change types of payment anytime. Depending on the goals of each ads, users can adjust the payment plans to fit with company budget.

Google Adwords is a great advertising tool due to its ability of “understand” advertising, identifying proper target groups in advertising, and helping customer in maximizing advertising effectiveness by following mechanisms:

Display ads in certain time periods.

Display advertising messages according to choose the right keywords.

Display ads by regional, national or even global.

Norm advertising budget by day, by stages.

Thanks to the extremely versatile ability to customize ads, Google Adwords is the top choice in the advertising campaign of many enterprises.

Let’s say you sell Hemorrhoids Treatments and Hemorrhoids Diet Supplements, your ad might appear on sites that discussed Hemorrhoids disease symptoms, Hemorrhoids diet and related topics. Anyone browsing the web for Hemorrhoids diet information, or Hemorrhoids symptoms and learning about Hemorrhoids may be interested in buying Hemorrhoids treatments from your site, if your ad site provides relevant content, and good information that they are looking for and ranks in the first page, where they can see your ads at the first sight. If your ad is not ranked in the top 8 ads, your ad will be out of customer’s sight. To know more how Google Adword payment plan, how it works with your goals and how your ad is ranked, please see my previous blog!

In this blog, I will dive deeper in how Google Adwords work and how we apply it to business.

First of all, we will learn about how to navigate Adwords account. There are 6 main tabs in Adwords account:

2. Campaigns: Here’s where you’ll spend most of your time when you’re managing your AdWords account. You can create and edit campaigns, ads, keywords, and campaign settings. In the performance summary graphs at the top of the page, you’ll see an overview of how your campaigns are performing. You can also download the tables containing your performance.

4. Tools and Analysis: Find account tools that will help you manage and improve your account. Use advanced reporting tools to locate potential issues and fix them before they become issues.
5. Billing: Enter and change your billing details, see your entire billing history, and print invoices.
6. My account: Control your personal information, such as your sign-in information and user preferences. If you choose to, you can use this tab to invite a friend or colleague to manage your AdWords account.

Let’s think about Chaebols conglomerate of South Korea, or Keiretsu conglomerate of Japan! These conglomerates use pyramid structure to build strong empire, control over operating enterprises, get all power of market and wipe out competitors. The more tiers to the pyramid, the larger power of control the market.

This mechanism works the same for your Adwords campaign. Stop bundling all of your keywords into one campaign and one ad group! The biggest mistake that most of marketers make is using one campaign, one ad group, and 100+ key-terms with only one ad. Google’s structure is hierarchical, allowing easy, precise management of your keywords. Campaigns allow you to manage a number of Ad Groups, and ad groups allow you to manage the specific ads for a particular set of key terms. The more group ads that you have, the more chances your customers will see your ads.

This is the example that I make for Hemorrhoids Treatments and Hemorrhoids Diet Supplements ad campaigns.

Create Extremely Specific Ads, Match Your Ads to Your Terms

Leverage Google’s specificity! To run a successful AdWords account you must take advantage of Google’s specificity. Do you remember the long tail keywords in organic search? With paid search, it does not really different. If your ad is too general, you will get nothing. If you want to get more people to actually click, you have to try to split up your campaigns, ad groups and keywords as much as you can. It means you may have a lot more ad groups and campaigns to monitor and manage, but the results will be well worth your time and effort.

Create Specific Keywords, Ad Text and Landing Pages for Each Ad Group

Ad Text is the actual text that will appear when your ad is triggered. Each ad group should have 2-3 ads per ads per group directing to the same landing page. You have to make sure that each ad directs to an extremely relevant page, which reflects not only the keywords you’re bidding on within that ad group, but also the ad text displaying in the search engine results page. Landing page relevancy and optimization are critical to see success with PPC.

Stay Up-To-Date, Use Google’s Help Resources

One of the best things about Google AdWords is constantly evolving new features including mobile ads, image ads, video ads, keyword tools etc. Try to maximize all functions that Google Adwords offering to get the best results!

With a well-structured account, you can determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions (like sales or leads) and traffic, monitor changes easily, have better control over budgets and costs, locate specific keywords quickly and manage and edit your campaigns easily. There are a lot of effort to build effective campaign and deliver it to potential customers. Therefore, you have to know how to build profitable Google Adwords account and stay profitable. Google AdWords is harder than you think. Yes, it is! However, be patient! Your hard work will pay off!

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one form of online marketing, applied to the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo … Nowadays, with the development of technology, online service seriously contributes to the changing of buyer habitual shopping. Due to its fast, convenient and comfortable features of online shopping, buyers start to shop more online rather than in-store. Before transactions, they highly engage in searching activities to compare and contrast between brands, services or products. That is the reason why SEM service is born and many businesses adopt SEM strategy to increase sales as well as company’s performance.

In the internet marketing tree model, we can see that SEM is stated in the first branch (from the bottom to the top and the left to the right), this represents important role of SEM in inbound marketing. SEM is considered as the internet marketing channel which is used to attract customer’s attention directly. How does SEM work to attract customers?

Green Box is shown SEO results and Red Boxes are shown Paid Search results on Google search engine. Previously, I had never clicked on the Red Boxes, I thought it contains virus or links to some bad pages. For those who have the same thoughts like me, feel free to click now!

1. Organic search is list of websites that match someone’s search phrase. No one can pay to have their website show up in these results. Organic search (SEO) does not mainly contain advertising results. Therefore, it is not surprising that most searchers click on the organic results. According to HubSpot statistics, over 70% of people click on the organic search results, while only 30% are likely to click on the paid links. To know more about SEO, please visit my Search Engines Optimized (SEO) blog!

2. Paid Search is list of ads that match someone’s search phrase. Advertisers can pay to have their ads show based on the keywords and targeting methods they’ve chosen and the ads they’ve created.

For the rest of the blog, I will focus on how Paid Search works, and how it benefits businesses.

In Google search, Paid Search works based on keywords, bids, and Quality Score.

Keywords: the words or phrases you choose that can trigger your ad to show on search and other sites. The more specific you are, the more chances your ads are triggered to show on other sites across the Internet.

Your bid: the maximum amount you’re willing to spend.

Quality Score: a measurement of the quality of your ads, keywords, he quality of your landing page and website.

In Bing Search, Your ad position is based on several things, including:

How closely your ad and website fit with the terms that are searched (relevance)

How your bid compares to other bids in the Bing Ads auction (bid based on how much you are willing to pay per each click on your ad)

How strongly your ad has performed in the past and how often it has been clicked (click-through rate)

The stronger you are in these areas, the better your chances of winning the top ad position.

Overall, Bid expenditures play crucial role to decide your ads rankings. There are three options that you can choose based on your budget and your Paid Search strategy.

Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM): The number of times your ad shows.

Cost-per-aquisition (CPA): Each time people take a specific action on your website after clicking on one􏰀 of your ads.

Cost-per-click (CPC): The average price you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Avg. CPC is useful when you want to compare the performance of different keywords, campaigns, ads, etc. Also referred to as: pay-per-click. [ Avg. CPC ] = [ Cost ] / [ Clicks ]

To maximize your Paid Search advantages, the first thing you need to ensure is your goal. What is your goal for each ad? Depending on your goal, you will have different tactics to achieve your goal.

1. If goal is increasing traffics to your websites, you should focus on increasing your clicks, and clickthrough rate, maintaining good keyword performance, and reviewing your search terms. For this goal, cost-per-click option is best suited.

2. If you want to increase sales or other types of conversions, you need to choose relevant destination URLs and try to increase conversion rates. Cost-per-aquisition option is a good option for this strategy.

4. If your goal is growing your return-on-investment (ROI), you first need to start measuring conversions, and then evaluate your ROI to make sure that the dollars you spend on advertising are turning into profits for your business. You can use cost-per-aquisition option.

More even harshly than SEO, if your ad is not in customer’s sights and not appealing to them, they will never scroll down to find your ads or click on your ads. Hence, you have to well prepare your content and your ads to compete with other competitors. Here are some useful tips that you can apply to your Paid Search strategy to differentiate your ad pages to your competitors.

Old tactic, but extremely helpful! A/B testing! Testing and optimizing your landing pages: Paid search is a great way to do landing page A/B testing because it allows you to direct traffic to your choice of pages, split this traffic to different pages, and ultimately find the pages that convert at the highest rate.

In a nutshell, when you implement SEM strategy in your inbound marketing. You have to make sure that you have good connection between organic search and paid search. You need to pay more attention and efforts on choosing your keywords on Paid Search rather than SEO. Lastly, building successful SEM plan is not an easy thing for various problems. Keep trying and making awesome stuff!

Search Engines Optimized (SEO) is not an unfamiliar terminology to people nowadays. Instead, it becomes indispensable thing in our life. For those who have no ideas about “Search Engines Optimized”, but if I mention “Google”, you surely know it. Google is one of giants in Search Engines Optimized industry. Besides Google, Bing and Yahoo are also leaders in searching engines.

We have thousand of reasons to use Google everyday. To me, apart from searching, I use Google to check my grammar spelling. It sounds awkward, huh? For example, when I confuse between “everyone use” or “everyone uses”, I just simply type “everyone use”. Then, the list will drop down, likes below image.

It shows the most phrases that people search for. By looking at it, I know the answer, “everyone” go with “uses”. That is just a small funny function of Google that I demonstrate. More importantly, the point of Google is helping people find exactly the content that they want to find.

Previously, I thought that to have high ranking in Google, you have to pay a lot of money to Google. After diving deeper to SEO, I know that I was partially wrong. Can we pay to get higher rankings? Yes! We called it “black hats” tactic, and it is unethical action.

For the rest of this blog, I will show you basic principles of SEO (what SEO is, how it works, and tactics to get high ranking) and what MOZ can do for your business. In addition, I will only show you “white hats” tactics, which can help your pages rank higher in ethical ways.

Let’s imagine that you are a world librarian, and you manage all the books in the world. People come to you every second to find the book that they need. You need to know what the content of every book is and how books relate to each other, so you can recommend your customer right books. How can you help them to find the right one? Of course, it is impossible to read all the books.

That is the way SEO do. SEO works as a scanner system. Search engines like Google and Bing are the librarians on the Internet. Their systems collect information about every page on the web, so they can help people find exactly what they are looking for in every search.

However, there are tons of tons information in the “universal internet”. How can they grab the right content and deliver to you best answers? The engines employ mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort the content from the book (relevance), and then to rank the content in order of quality (popularity). When your pages get higher rankings, it means that more people can see your pages.

These algorithms often comprise hundreds of variables. In the search marketing field, we refer to them as “ranking factors.” Moz crafted a resource specifically on this subject: Search Engine Ranking Factors.

SEO is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visitors from search engines.

Websites compete for attention and placement in the search engines, and those with the knowledge and experience to improve their website’s ranking will receive the benefits of increased traffic and visibility. My goal is helping our business website to be in the top of results by creating most relevant, useful, and trustworthy contents to answers customer’s questions.

After doing some research and study material, I realize that three following techniques significantly contribute to the increasing rankings of business website.

1. Keyword

Keyword occupy an important position in your website ranking. The more keyword that your content match with your buyer personas searching, the higher your website rank. Therefore, you have to create content which contains the keywords that your customer search for.

Things to do:

Make a list of keywords your buyer personas would search for.

Mimic the language that your buyer personas use.

Expand that list by searching the web for alternatives

Determine which keywords people are using to find your site.

Analyze your competitors’ websites for keywords

Access keyword performance metrics at glance

Keyword data matching with page elements

Using long-tail keyword. (Long-tail keyword is easier to rank for because it’s more specific and targeted, so you would have the best opportunity to rank for. )

Let your language flow naturally.

Things should not do:

Repeat the keywords as many times as possible.

Using short or broad keyword. (Because it is very general, so it’s harder to rank and to compete with other competitors around it.)

2. Optimizing content around a primary keyword.

Next important step that you should pay attention to is optimizing content around a primary keyword.

Where should you place the primary keyword?

Page title

URL

Body

Headers

Image alt-text

Meta description (Each page should have a unique short meta description.)

3. Link Building

Finally, the way to earning links to your content is adding hyperlink text with keywords that you’d like to rank for. Linking to relevant, and reliable sources help build the trustworthiness of your site. Don’t go overboard – link to one or two sources per paragraph at the very most. You don’t want your page to look spammy!

Last but not least, the crucial point is checking. You have to check your links regularly to make sure there are no broken links that you customers cannot access.

To reduce burdens for marketers, MOZ provides software and subscription services for companies that want to top their next set of web search results.

Just with 99$/ month, Moz Pro Subscription offers 12+ tools—including Moz Analytics, Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk, and more—to track and improve your SEO, social, branding, link building, and content marketing efforts. It helps marketers saving time by giving an all-in-one set of SEO research and analytics tools that help increase search engine visibility and keep business websites ahead of their competitors. Moz Pro is backed by industry-leading data and the largest community of SEOs on the planet.

Managing more than 100 locations? No problem. Only with $84 per location, MOZ improves visibility online at a price that works for your business. Consistent, visible local business listings across the web—and the reporting to prove it. MOZ ensures accurate, consistent, and visible listing information for multiple business locations takes time.

MOZ software and subscription are powerful tools for all kinds of businesses, from small business to large firms, and to multinational firms.

As human beings, we sometimes have mistakes. The common mistakes in SEO is choosing wrong keywords. Besides MOZ, HubSpot also a great tool that business can use due to its HubSpot’s Link Grader function. (Please check my previous blog to know more about HubSpot service! )

There is over 90% of internet users use search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc … With hundreds of millions or even billions of websites on the internet, how can customers find your website but not the website of the competitors? Notice that no users have patience see results up to 3 pages (each page displays 10 results) after performing a search on a search engine. The answers for your business is absolute SEO. Let’s implement your SEO strategy to solve your problems!

Marketing is literally understood as “the art of sales in marketing” in which you conduct many different marketing activities to learn about target market, customer’s need and want, and the way to meet their needs and generate profits.

To attract people’s attention, company uses a lot of methods, such as trading show to introduce the product, the symposium, sending e-mail, making cold calls, advertising on TV, radio, doing campaign, writing blogs, etc … The marketers eagerly tried every way to send their information to customers. Although their efforts bring success in the early stages, it creates the opposite effects, and increases ineffectiveness in the later stage.

People are annoyed by the massive amount of information that marketers impose on them, and they increasingly prove uncooperative attitudes. For example, emails are deleted without opening (they even use blocking software spam or withdrawn from your email list), and switching channels when TV / radio display advertisements.

That is the reason why most of companies move to new marketing strategy, inbound marketing. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the benefits of Outbound Marketing. The problem with Outbound Marketing is because marketers use it in the wrong ways. There are many elements in Tradition Marketing which can bring huge profits and can be substantially more successful for business when we do it right.

For every $1 spent on email marketing a business may receive an average return of $44.25.

It is a living proof that email marketing is certainly not dead. Email Marketing is surely alive!

For the rest of the blog, I will discuss about the Close stage in Inbound Marketing Methodology, and how to covert leads to customers successfully.

Email is one of the important components is the Close stage which notably contribute the success to business by transforming leads to customers. Therefore, we must know how to use email in the right way to maximize its advantages.

What will you think when you receive a marketing email with your name on it?

To me, I feel very surprised and respected, albeit I know it is just a marketing email. I think it is a clever way to change the “face” of email marketing, from Cold-Email to Warm-Email.

After doing some research and reading some materials, I have boiled them down to following points I believe to be the most important which can help businesses to build effective email marketing strategies.

1. Don’t treat your contacts like names on a list, treat them like people

If you’re a Constant Contact customer, you can group contacts into separate lists and create emails that are unique to their specific needs and interests. You can also create a series of automated emails with our Autoresponder tool to send to specific lists with information and offers relevant to them.

2. Send relevant content that has value to your recipient

Show subscribers you’ve got more to offer than deals and discounts. If you’re not sure what your email audience is interested in, consider sending an online survey. Constant Contact’s survey campaign makes it easy to collect feedback from your email audience and can help you better understand what makes your customers tick.

3. Never share your email list

Constant Contact’s contact management tools make it easy to protect your customer’s information. In addition to email address, you can also collect important details like demographic data, location, and even past purchasing behavior.

4. CATS rule

Right Content

Right Audience

Right Timing

= SUCCESS

5. HEART To HEART rule

Investing time and energy in your customers will empower them to do the same for you. In short, you have to think of your customers as more than customers. You should think of them as your friends. Hence, when you send email to your customers, you will choose information that you want to share with your friends. If you do really care for your customers, they will feel it too.

Another step of the Close stage in Inbound Marketing Methodology is SMARKETING. SMARKETING is critical to inbound success.

SMARKETING is the process of integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business. The objective is for the sales and marketing functions to have a common integrated approach. This can lead to annual revenue growth of up to 20%, according to a study in 2010.

The Complete Guide To Inbound Sales ebook has clearer definition about SMARKETING,

“Marketing + Sales = Service Level Agreement” is an agreement, almost like a contract, between the two teams, designed to help them work cohesively, put equal effort into the process and hold each other accountable for the results.

Normally, when marketers run a campaign or do inbound and outbound marketing, they do not have “Sale” term in mind. All they know and want is achieving high conversion rates, but there is no guarantee that high conversion rates can convert into high sales percents. By implementing SMARKETING strategy, aligning both marketing and sales around the same goal will help businesses solve the problem.

To integrate SMARKETING to business, HubSpot has recommended 5 following steps:

Speak the same language.

Implement a service level agreement.

Set up closed-loop reporting.

Rely on data.

Maintain open communication.

Nowadays, with the revolution of technology, a lot of business softwares are released to support business’s performance. SIDEKICK, HubSpot CRM, INSIGHTSQUARED, TINDERBOX, etc are great inbound sales tools which help to synchronize sales, marketing, customer service more efficiently.

Overall, as marketers or sale people, the ultimate goal of them should be provide a relevant, personal, and delightful experience for each of their prospects from start to finish. It is also business goals, beside generating huge profits. Having good tactics for inbound marketing become meaningless when we do not have effective team. Therefore, the more effective and efficient SMARKETING team is, the more successful business will gain.

Attractive screen, easy navigation and interesting technologies never stop to stimulate us to use a new Android application or an inspirational software. Businesses quickly reach online users and bring their customers to the applications or websites that help them connect quickly with one touch. Companies connect with their customers in creative ways and provide a convenient way to communicate, gather information and make transactions without any complexities. All the processes are related to UI/ UX design and landing pages. This blog will address the some important points about UI/UX design and how to make good landing pages.

UX Design (UXD) refers to the term User Experience Design (UED), while UI Design stands for User Interface Design (UID). UXD and UID are both important to physical products or e-business sites, and work side by side. Nevertheless, their functions are quietly different. UXD is primarily concerned with how the product feels, but UID is particular about how the product is laid out. UID and UXD make products that appeal to both cognition and emotion for a competitive advantage. It is very important to impress customers in a glance.

“The User Experience (UX)” phrase was first appeared in the famous book “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. User Experience is the common phrase to refer to the actions, emotions, and reactions of a person when they interact with a product, service or certain space. “UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry” article by Fast Company state that, UX designers explore many different approaches to solving a specific user problem. The broad responsibility of a UX designer is to ensure that the product logically flows from one step to the next. Previously, UX design term is only used for technology industry. Now, UXD can apply to many areas, such as lighting system, microwave, tour, banking, interior design, architecture, and etc. For website and web applications particularly, UXD refers to how a person feels when interfacing with a system, such as the layout of website in general. The image below shows UXD model in a website. The layout of website is very important, because it helps the businesses to attract more traffics. The better our website is, the more traffics that we can get. To know which layout of website versions is better, test A/B is the great tool which helps to reflect customer’s opinions.

UI DESIGNER (USER INTERFACE DESIGNER)

In a smartphone, the user screen applications like Google Maps and Facebook, help users to put in information and receive feedback. This is one kind of the user interface activities. To make applications or websites more appealing to customers, the website designers, and developers gather datas from UX researchers and design the websites or applications interface to meet requirements of the users; for example, how they want to navigate , what the content in menu is. The entire process of gathering user requirements, put different elements of the software and create an effective user interface design called user interface. According to “ UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer’s Guide To The Tech Industry” article by Fast Company, it states that UI designer’s responsibilities are creating a cohesive style guide and ensuring that a consistent design language is applied across the product. Maintaining consistency in visual elements and defining behavior such as how to display error or warning states fall under the purview of a UI designer. Sleek is not good enough to create a good user interface, but the good functionality of the software is the “central” of the point that UI designer need to pay attention.

Landing pages

After attracting people to your websites or web applications and providing their needs and wants, the next part is turning traffic into money. Landing pages is one of a great tool to help you to do that. Landing pages are designed to convert unknown website visitors into known leads.

When a visitor clicks on a call-to-action button, it will lead visitors to another page. That is called landing page. Notice that the landing page is separate from the home page. For example, In Gospel for Asia website, they offer Revolution in World Missions free book to collect customers information. This is a common strategy in Landing Page, but it is the most powerful and effective tactic. Besides offering free-book, depending on each business website, they can offers various of services which is relevant to their products, such as free premium plan for 3 days, free download, or trial consultation. Landing page help you to increasing your membership site sign-ups, ebook downloads, or product sales. It is also help you to build relationships with your leads. However, increasing your leads do not mean that you are success. Converting leads into money is more important, and that is the crucial business goal also. To achieve your goals, you have to have effective Landing Pages plan at first.

According to Copyblogger blog post, there are 5 mistakes that crush your Conversion Rates.

1. Blowing the headline

A better headline alone will boost the effectiveness of your landing page, and even overcome some of the other mistakes below. Split-testing different headlines is relatively painless, and can bring you much higher conversions compared with multiple other tweaks.

2. Using your regular site design

While your typical sidebar and header approach to a blog post is fine, when it comes down to traffic hitting a landing page with a singular focus on specific action, all of that extraneous stuff causes confusion, distraction, and reduced conversions.

3. Asking for more than one thing

An effective landing page asks for one specific action, and that’s it. And don’t forget to actually clearly ask for that one specific thing, which is an even bigger conversion killer if you don’t.

4. Ignoring basic aesthetics

Great landing pages use fonts, colors, and visuals that are tailored specifically to the audience and action you desire, thereby enhancing the experience and boosting conversions.

5. Being lazy

Did you know that web users spend 80% of their time above the fold? It does not mean that they won’t scroll down the page, but it just means you can’t take it for granted that they will (instead of leaving).

There are hundreds and hundreds of advices to help you create efficient landing pages. Nevertheless, I believe that if you just simply avoid 5 mistakes above, your Conversion Rates will increase notably. In my opinion, I just have three easy memorizable recommendations to build effective landing pages.

1. Don’t wast your efforts to leads who never buy your products!

2. TryA/B testing and try different set ups. Why? Check out my previous blog to see the important role of A/B testing!

3. Make it clear and simple to use. It is very annoying if you have complex Landing Pages. Try not to ask your customers to fill a lot of information, read a lot of text or see many links/choices! It makes your customers feel irritated, confused and quit the process prematurely.

In a nutshell, UID and UXD work closely together to build effective websites and landing pages. To have good landing page, you have to have effect UI/UX design strategy. All of traffics can become your potential customers. The more you able to grab and hold website visitor’s attention in your sites, the nearer approach the goal that you are.

Content Marketing is one of the most important part in Inbound Marketing. However, if content is considered as a King, social media is Queen. Social Media helps you to distribute your content and engages with your customer. Without Social Media, there is no Content Marketing. The success of Content Marketing strategy bases heavily on Social Media distribution. Therefore, it is very crucial for business to choose the right online networks. According to “ The Beginner’s Guide To Social Media” of MOZ, social media is a way for people to communicate and interact online. Three main types of social media channels are owned media (hosted communities, blogs, etc), rented media (social networks or third-party communities), and occupied media (commenting, contributing, etc.). There is an explosion of social media channels growth over the last several years, such as Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. As reported by HubSpots, 74% of marketers saw in increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media. The transformation in web consumerism and accompanying rise in social media brings both opportunity and responsibility for businesses. Not only does social media help to convert visitors into leads, but it also helps to engage to customers. Knowing the power of social media, the question given here is do your businesses have right strategy to maximize its efficiency and effectiveness? If you are not, my “3R” self-asked questions will help you to build effective social media marketing plan.

Right Place: Did you choose right social media channels to connect with your customers? Choosing right social media channels is extremely important, the following charts will show the reasons why.

According to these charts, it is clearly to see that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have different types of target market. For rented social media channel, you have to study its target market carefully to see whether they have your audience or not. If you have excellent content, but you deliver to wrong audience, it would waste your efforts and investments. Therefore, you have to make sure that you deliver your content to right audiences by right social media channels.

Right content: Is your content effective? If you have good content, you will generate sales more efficiently, pull in unexpected customers, build valuable relationships with your audience, enhance your brand image and boost your customer engagement. The better content that you create and distribute, the closer to the goals that you will get. Please see my previous blog to know how to write effective content!

Right time: When should I deliver content to customers? According to KISS Metric blog, It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is eavesdropping on your social networks—so that when you share content you’ll get maximum exposure. For example, on Twitter, the best time to tweet is noon and 6 PM and the best day to tweet is in the midweek and weekend. The science of social media timing is very different from each social media channel. Therefore, to exposure the highest percentage of your audience for each content post, you have to research the timing of your audience in each social media channels.

DAVIDsTEA is a small business which was found five years ago in Montreal, Quebec. Today, DAVIDsTEA is recognied globally that celebrates loose leaf tea and relates to thousands of loyal customers on a personal level. The biggest contribution to their success is developing a lovable brand on Social Media strategy. According to Youri Hollier, DAVIDsTEA Social Media Manager, their social media strategy developed organically over time. The main goal has always been exposure and engagement. By sharing great content and “stepping outside of the comfort zone for businesses on social media,” they’ve had incredible success. While the content varies from channel to channel, their main content features recipes, contests, fan and staff-generated content, promotional posts and recurring posts – all with a fun modern twist while sharing their love for their product and customers. In addition, they are very good at two way communications on all Social Media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Google Places, Foursquare, and Yelp. They respond to every comment, like and share – the good and the bad – on social. Unlike the other brands, instead of having robotic response, DAVIDsTEA treat everyone with unique conversation. I took screenshot of this conversation in their Facebook posts. Through the conversation, we can see how they show their respects and cares to their customers. This is just one great example from thousands and thousands nice conversations that they make. Furthermore, the biggest problem that DAVIDsTEA faced as a company with regard to social media was capturing evening single tweet discussing DAVIDsTEA brand. To solve the problem, DAVIDsTEA integrated Hootsuite in to the workflow. Hootsuite allows them to set up streams and lists to ensure that everyone is responded to and conversations continue on Twitter. The clever Social Media strategy helped DAVIDsTEA to grow social business across North America, increase customer engagement, increase brand exposure, and gain 95-99% customer service satisfaction rate on Twitter. DAVIDsTEA is just one lively success story. Besides DAVIDsTEA, there are a tons of success business stories when they take advantages of social media. Aside from helping business in promoting company brand, increasing sales and enhancing customer engagement, social media also helps business to find good employees. Recently, I track internship opportunities in FaithLife Company and I found this below box in FaithLife’s website. Does it look very cool? No resume needed, LinkedIn will tell it all! Resume can be fake, but experiences cannot be fake. Through LinkedIn profile, it is easier for recruiters to see qualification of each candidate rather than one page resume. LinkedIn allows people to show what they did on their profile, like project, test score, publications, patents, posts, etc, so recruiters can evaluate the candidate’s talent based on what she/he has showed on LinkedIn profile.

In a nutshell, the longer you wait, the more you have to lose. If you have right strategy on social media marketing, it can lead to more customers, more traffics, more conversions, and more talented and qualified employees. If you have not deployed your social media marketing plan or had effective social media marketing strategy for your business yet, let’s start today!